Schoox LMS Overview
Schoox has been in the industry for more than a decade. They currently specialize in the areas of workplace eLearning software. With their headquarters located in Austin, Texas, they've managed to create a strong brand name in the USA.
What I love about Schoox is that they fundamentally differ from other platforms. They have a people-first mentality, hence managing to offer superb User Experience without disregarding the comprehensive approach to developing top talent.
Data talks better than words, so I wasn't surprised to learn that they have gained the trust of more than 2500 clients. And, to translate that number into how many people have benefited from the Schoox LMS, 22 million learners have made one step forward in their career growth by utilizing this platform.
Many of their clients are from the United States, Canada, and the UK.
Subway, Celebrity Cruises, Phillips 66, Dairy Queen, and Sonesta Hotels are only some of the major companies that have been working with Schoox for the last few years.
Schoox is consistent in proving that it can quickly adapt to the needs of a modern workforce. And that's why clients choose them to unlock team potential, drive performance, and accelerate business results.
Complexity doesn't scare them. No matter what your learning needs are, they can help you utilize their tools to become a future-ready company and adapt to changing business demands.
Let's get a little deeper into the platform.
What Is Schoox LMS?
Schoox is workplace learning software with a people-first twist. People aren't cogs, and this platform was designed for how humans actually learn. They keep learners curious by letting you deliver more kinds of content wherever they are, from the front line to the corporate office. And by making learning easy, accessible, rewarding, and fun, they help you get everyone more excited about their career development. Learners can "up" their skills, grow on the job, and get more done—and you can measure the impact of their accomplishments.
Some of their best use cases are:
- Frontline worker training
- Extended enterprise
- Employee onboarding
- Talent development
- Compliance training
- Franchise training
Schoox offers a platform particularly designed for real learning. You can use it to train teams throughout your entire organization. It can surely transform your company's training department. If you're looking for a training solution that creates opportunities for learners to thrive, it's an excellent choice.
With Schoox, you can provide all the flexibility required to take learning to the next level and drive your business forward.
Courses And Types Of Learning Scenarios
It may have started as an employee LMS for compliance, but their team has managed to go past that and expand the solution for all aspects of the employee lifecycle.
For example, the solution now includes components around performance like performance reviews, goal management, learning skill management, career pathing and development, and social interaction. Plus, it has really strong gamification features. Managers can leverage grouping and incentives to make training so much more engaging.
If you're looking for a talent management system, Schoox offers a viable solution; I'd say it's a great mid-market or upper-mid-market solution for employee development. There are a lot of strengths that come along with Schoox, and not only from a usability standpoint. It looks nice, clean, and sharp. There are lots of interesting visual indicators.
For me, the accurate integration with HCM and other HR systems of record is what makes the difference. That's how you can reflect the true organizational structure of your business.
You can manage formal and informal learning. When it comes to social learning, there's the wall concept (like Facebook). All employees can connect with other learners and the organization through the wall and social collaboration features. You can utilize different variants by giving access to employees at any given organization.
The platform offers announcements and a notifications system, so everyone in the company can use it as a communication tool and an information hub. Their mobile app is fantastic; it's a true replication of all the features of Schoox.
It’s an ideal platform for those who want to run many different types of formal and informal learning, have a complex organizational structure, or simply need to manage compliance and employee development, all while tying that to true skills, competency, and career development. Plus, you can measure all the above to get a true view of learning’s impact on the business.
With Schoox, you can have the learner experience and all that integrated mindset without having to deal with multiple platforms. You can handle everything from one place.
That's what makes it a viable solution.
Targeted Businesses
Schoox is an enterprise learning and talent management system. It really provides broad capabilities and is designed to cover the needs of the HR market.
The team at Schoox has taken an employee compliance LMS targeted at retail, banking, financial, hospitality, grocery, etc., and expanded it to a broader audience by adding capabilities that other performance and talent management HR systems have.
For example, companies like Celebrity Cruises, Checkers & Rally’s, Dairy Queen, Kioti Tractor, Phillips 66, Sonesta Hotels, and Subway use Schoox for their training. Based on the above, you can understand that different types of industries can leverage the platform to accomplish their goals. Schoox ensures that the right learning gets to the right people, no matter the complexity of the organization.
At the moment, most of its targeted businesses are within restaurant, hospitality, retail, manufacturing, technology (computers, software, ISP, etc.), business service/consulting, and banking/finance. In the last few years, the platform has also expanded in industries like construction, transportation, telecommunications, and even nonprofit organizations.
L&D practitioners in any of the above fields can leverage the platform to solve their challenges and pain points. Be it relieving administration burden and reducing the time devoted to creating learning experiences or having difficulty supporting multiple user groups within one system, you can manage all of it. Plus, you get truly automatic and insightful reporting. Schoox is top-class when it comes to generating meaningful impact reports and delivering instruction within the flow of work.
Know that Schoox can ease the support of all types of employees, affiliated workers, and customers within one system. It offers flexibility to support workers who play multiple roles. And there's a breadth of content types and devices supported.
Setup And Ongoing Support
With Schoox, you get all the tools you need in an all-in-one solution. And you can deploy in weeks or months, not years. So, if you want to encourage your learners to adapt faster and connect deeper, Schoox is the ideal tool. Not only will they learn more, but they'll perform better.
Numbers speak louder than words. So, here's some data about Schoox:
- 90%+ support satisfaction
- 90%+ customer retention
- 60 NPS score (20+ is favorable)
Change is constant, and that stands for any company, organizational process, and training. Schoox's x factor is the adaptability that they have. You can share your goals with them, and they'll work with you to make it happen. They build trusting relationships with clients, thus managing to become an extension of your team.
The team at Schoox is always there to support you on your onboarding journey and throughout the entire customer lifecycle. They take the time to establish open feedback loops. Their support always listens carefully and is set to continuously enhance the product.
When rolling out your new LMS, Schoox follows a multiphase onboarding and implementation process. We had no problem working with their technical and customer support specialists. Excellent collaboration between them and our teams. We could easily determine timelines and system integrations, and discussed the data migration and rollout plans.
Supporting an extended enterprise training model is robust. So, even if you want to be able to drive training out to your partners or customers but still allow them to control training within their own organization, it can easily be done.
License Model/Pricing
This platform is considered less expensive than the industry average, and that's obviously a plus. The team at Schoox works to understand the needs of your organization and then puts together a pricing proposal. All the features of the platform are included in one price. However it is highly configurable, so different areas can be turned on or off as needed.
Integrations
When it comes to integrations, Schoox doesn't disappoint.
With this platform, you can connect learners, content, and data easily. You're able to have seamless data flow and get more insightful reporting. All combined with enhanced collaboration and efficiency across your whole organization.
You can easily connect your learning platform with your HRIS. I was glad to see that Schoox offers plenty of APIs and data connections. This allows for flexibility and lets you integrate with virtually any HR and HCM system. For example, the system has ready-made connections with ADP, Oracle, Paylocity, SAP, UKG, and Workday.
Those in the food and beverage, hospitality, or family entertainment industries are going to appreciate the system's integration with Fourth (previously known as Hotschedule).
What's more, you can connect it to other productivity systems you're using. By connecting Schoox to Google, Microsoft, Zoom, GoToTraining, Webex, and similar tools you're already using at your organization, you can give your people a single place to collaborate.
Best of all, you can provide one place for content consumption. Schoox is able to integrate with almost any content library. You can even use your own custom content and link to web resources you've found on YouTube. Schoox empowers you to have turnkey integrations with leading eLearning providers. For example, you can leverage content from BizLibrary, HSI, KnowCyber, StateFoodSafety, Traliant, UL Solutions, Restaurant Playbooks, AllerTrain, MasteryTCN, and Intellezy. And, integrations with Udemy and OpenSesame are coming in Spring 2023.
Finally, Schoox has made it possible to increase security and simplify the login experience for learners. If you're looking for single sign-on, Schoox connects with providers like Okta, SAML, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Fourth.
If you need to go beyond the out-of-the-box integrations, Schoox offers the ability to integrate with almost any system through RESTful API, the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), or the external APIs of third-party systems.
Be it HRIS, HCM, CRM, shift management, business intelligence, homegrown applications, and more, you can configure a custom integration.
Feature Highlights
When it comes to value proposition, Schoox is a workplace learning software with a people-first twist. It makes learning and career development easy, accessible, rewarding, and fun, so whatever your learners need to know just "clicks."
The system is great at driving adoption and retention. Managers can get an at-a-glance look at the state of the training and take action on what they see. For example, you can program a game to automatically award a badge when a learner completes training or incentivize them to complete challenges with a team leaderboard.
It's awesome that you can manage OJT through observational checklists and bring online training into a real-world environment. Also, I like that you can bring a video as evidence on an OJT task. You can leave comments and rate performance with ease. Layering in e-signatures is another way you can make sure to maintain compliance.
I even enjoyed the use of the QR code feature. Learners can go right to a particular course by scanning QR codes that you post on communication boards or elsewhere. And, trainers can also use them to track attendance at in-person events by scanning a learner’s QR code.
In addition, the system gives the ability to curate videos. You can pull from YouTube, other video platforms, or even user-generated videos. It has a really easy drag-and-drop course builder that allows you to sequence multiple videos or learning objects into the steps of a course.
Another great feature is that it has geo-fencing. Meaning, if you want, you can prohibit employees from taking training outside of the workplace and ensure they can only take training during working hours.
As you can see, there are many features I loved when testing the platform. However, there are more than a few that caught my eye, and I want to shed some light on them.
To be more specific, I'd like to highlight the following:
- Built to accommodate flexible, multi-unit organizational structures
The Schoox org structure/hierarchy module can accommodate the most complex businesses and power many elements of the LMS, including access, permissions for reporting, assigning courses, managing employees, and more.
- Offers an intuitive mobile experience
Schoox's free, native mobile app for iOS and Android devices gives learners the full power of Schoox on their mobile device. Employees can access coursework and content and even download lectures and complete course steps when offline. They receive instant notifications for new announcements, assignments, due dates, and more.
- Enables easy, customizable reporting with business impact
With Schoox, admins and training managers can access easy-to-use training dashboards. Build any type of report with Report Builder; set specific fields and filters, and export your customized report in CSV. Create a template or have them automatically delivered on a schedule.
- Understands the correlation between training metrics and KPIs
What I love most about Schoox is that it helps you understand learning’s impact on the business. You can leverage the analytics by comparing training metrics and KPIs within the LMS. Leaders can develop trends and measure them to see how training has improved performance. So, it's undoubtedly a solution that covers the employee development process in a full cycle.
- Provides staff ranking
Schoox has an intelligent algorithm that's capable of ranking employees on jobs, skills, and acquired training. By leveraging this algorithm, you can discover your team's strengths and weaknesses. Plus, you can easily find the right talent for a certain project or even a new role within the company.
Pros/Cons Of Schoox LMS
My number one reason for choosing Schoox is its robust analytics and automated reporting to prove the impact of training on KPIs. You can track business impact based on Level 4 of Kirkpatrick's model. Meaning you can actually bring revenue into the metrics. For sure, I haven't seen anything like this before.
Of course, there's the ease of implementation and time to value. Can't deny that. We all need a tool that can be implemented fast and easily. Another one of its pros is that it allows automatic compliance tracking and reporting. And as far as content is concerned, I like that it gives you the power to incorporate learner-generated content. Social learning support is also a plus.
In addition, I'd like to give Schoox credit for the ease of content management and curation. It's one of the best I've witnessed. I have been testing several platforms, and their UI is certainly simple and, at the same time, impressive.
I also like that, with Schoox, you have the ability to instruct in the flow of work. That's something I don't often see in other tools. Obviously, I enjoyed the ease of support for individualized learning journeys and career pathing. There's truly a breadth of content types and experiences supported.
When it comes to cons, I can't say there is much, but there's always room for improvement in existing features and content delivery. For example, let's talk about their content libraries. Maybe an SMB can't always find the specialized content they want within the content marketplace offerings of Schoox. However, Schoox is currently working with ten different content partners offering over 18,000 courses and continues to broaden its network of content offerings.
That's great, considering there will be even more variety of training topics, including both general and industry-specific training. For example, they've just added StateFoodSafety and Intellezy as two new content partners and have plans to add more soon.
Regarding content authoring, Schoox doesn't offer an integrated tool within the platform to create custom content, but clients can use any authoring tool they like and upload courses within the system. So, I can't argue with that. If you already have an authoring tool, you won't have any issues. Plus, you can also upload any purchased content you have.
I'm very hyped to see what's coming next.
User Satisfaction
User Experience is at the center of the Schoox platform. Leadership teams will enjoy the platform's ability to support multiple modes of learning and managerial sign-offs on skills retention. Best of all? As your company grows, Schoox enables you to set up multiple academies for each distinct business unit. For your convenience, you can manage it all through a single platform.
I was very pleased to see how well you can handle onboarding and culture-related training. Schoox is excellent at providing a consistent onboarding experience to all audiences. Asynchronous content combined with on-the-job training works pretty well. And it's great because you can ensure that, for instance, managers in one location receive the same level of training as managers in another part of the country.
Finding a solution that makes it possible to pair on-demand, asynchronous content with live, in-person, or virtual instructor-led sessions is critical for many companies, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. When it comes to hybrid teams, a solution like Schoox can save the day. It definitely gives you the best of both worlds.
The team at Schoox can help you engage team members with mobile and social collaboration across the organization. The platform also serves as a convenient way for the company to connect and communicate with your entire organization with just one action. Features like this make the platform particularly valuable, especially in cases where employees don't even have corporate email accounts. In addition, company leaders can leverage Schoox to address a variety of immediate project management needs.
You'll have no problem organizing learning according to relationships like person-to-person, person-to-unit, and unit-to-person. All these possibilities open opportunities for hyper-focused communication, learning content, information sharing, reporting, and much more.
The LMS allows learners to view and take courses on any device. And with its mobile app, you can connect with employees anytime, anywhere. Plus, it enables users to view and take assessments. To add to that, it includes strong search capabilities. Hence, finding what you're looking for becomes a piece of cake.
Schoox is all about flexibility, and that makes it a one-stop shop for all things Learning and Development. Certainly, you can leverage it to introduce new team members to your corporate culture and deliver a continuous, personalized learning experience for each employee.
Customer Support
Even though Schoox is easy to understand and use, sometimes you might need to contact their support team.
Schoox's customer support makes you feel well taken care of as it is managed completely “in house.” They’re available by phone and email 24/7. They have other support-related offerings like a bi-weekly open office hours, quarterly product update webinars, and more. You'll see that day-to-day interactions and even the turnaround time of customer support are above average.
And if you need help with the reports, their customer success reps will assist you in spotting gaps in training and learning and help understand other areas of the product that could help you meet your L&D goals.
Benefitting From Schoox LMS
If you want to go past systems with clunky interfaces and have the ability to support both employees and non-employees alike, then you've hit the jackpot.
Schoox is truly a very reliable LMS. You can use it to drive training out to thousands of learners in multiple countries around the globe, and everything will work to a tee. Unit managers will definitely enjoy managing training within their own businesses without worrying about the overlap between their extended enterprise.
For example, as Head of Learning (and Talent Development), you need to tackle several challenges. The main one being the rapid transformation of your workforce and rising expectations of workers for consumer-grade technology. With Schoox, you get a platform that delivers consistently and scales at ease. No more legacy systems and processes that are too cumbersome and non-engaging.
This learning platform organizes learning in a way that reflects your business, thus helping you support franchising and multiple branches. If you want to be able to make connections between different groups and the organization as a whole, it's ideal.